Wordorigins.org

calcium

Dave Wilton, Friday, September 04, 2009

The name of calcium, element number 20, comes from the Latin calx, meaning lime, + the -ium suffix. It was first isolated from lime in 1808 by British chemist Humphry Davy, as recorded in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of that year:

I shall venture to denominate the metals from the alkaline earths barium, strontium, calcium, and magnium.1

Calcium has the chemical symbol Ca, taken from the first two letters of its name.

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